The present-day U.S. military qualifies by any measure as highly professional, much more so than its Cold War predecessor. Yet the purpose of today’s professionals is not to preserve peace but to fight unending wars in distant places. Intoxicated by a post-Cold War belief in its own omnipotence, the United States allowed itself to be drawn into a long series of armed conflicts, almost all of them yielding unintended consequences and imposing greater than anticipated costs. Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. forces have destroyed many targets and killed many people. Only rarely, however, have they succeeded in accomplishing their assigned political purposes. . . . [F]rom our present vantage point, it becomes apparent that the “Revolution of ‘89” did not initiate a new era of history. At most, the events of that year fostered various unhelpful illusions that impeded our capacity to recognize and respond to the forces of change that actually matter.

Andrew Bacevich


Saturday, January 1, 2011

War News for Saturday, December 01, 2011

NATO is reporting the death of an ISAF soldier from an insurgent attack in an undisclosed location in western Afghanistan on Friday, December 31st. News reports this is an Italian soldier killed by small arms attack-sniper fire.

NATO is reporting the death of an ISAF soldier from an IED attack in an undisclosed location in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, January 1st.


U.S. efforts fail to convince Pakistan's top general to target Taliban


Reported security incidents

Baghdad:
#1: An officer of Baghdad’s Rusafa Police has been killed with his driver by a group of unknown gunmen, using silencer guns in central Baghdad on Saturday, according to a security source. “A group of armed men, using silencer guns, have killed Colonel Ihsan Ali from Baghdad’s Rusafa Police and his driver on Mohammed al-Qassim highway, close to the Iraqi Finance Ministry in central Baghdad,” he told Aswat al-Iraq news agency, giving no further details.


Diyala Prv:
#1: A roadside bomb planted inside the house of a local official killed his wife and wounded him seriously when it went off in western Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) northeast of Baghdad, police said.


Tal Afar:
#1: “A soldier of the Iraqi Army’s 3rd Division, has died due to wounds he suffered in an armed attack on his patrol in Talaafar town, 60 kms to the north of Mosul, the center of Ninewa Province,” the security source told Aswat al-Iraq news agency. A Ninewa police official had informed Aswat al-Iraq news agency last Monday that a soldier had been killed and another solder was seriously injured in an armed attack on an Army patrol in Hay al-Salam district, north of Talaafar.


Al Anbar Prv:
#1: An Iraqi soldier was killed and three others wounded in an attack by unidentified gunmen on a checkpoint in eastern al-Falluja city on Friday, a security source said. “Unidentified gunmen waged an armed attack on an Iraqi army checkpoint in the area of Dhira’a Dijla, al-Karma district, eastern Falluja, leaving one soldier killed and three others wounded,” the source told Aswat al-Iraq news agency.

#2: Two Iraqi military camps have become target for two mortar shells east of Falluja, the largest city in west Iraq’s Anbar Province on Saturday, one of them felll on a police center east of the city, causing material damage only, a security source said. “A mortar shell fell on Saturday morning on a headquarter of an emergency battalion in Garma village east of Falluja city, whilst another mortar shell fell on a police center in Albu-Jassim area, east of the city too,” he added.



Afghanistan: "The Forgotten War"
#1: Two U.S. missile strikes about two hours apart killed at least 14 men near the Afghan border in northwest Pakistan on Saturday, two Pakistani intelligence officials said. At least nine people were killed in the first strike when missiles destroyed a moving vehicle in the Spin Wam area of the North Waziristan tribal region, the officials said. Two hours later drones fired more missiles at people who had gathered to retrieve the bodies, killing five, they said.

#2: The coalition said Saturday that five of the insurgents were killed a day earlier in an operation targeting a Taliban leader in the northern Kunduz province. It was unclear whether the Taliban leader was among those killed or detained.

2 comments:

Dancewater said...

Research links rise in Falluja birth defects and cancers to US assault

A study examining the causes of a dramatic spike in birth defects in the Iraqi city of Falluja has for the first time concluded that genetic damage could have been caused by weaponry used in US assaults that took place six years ago.

The research, which will be published next week, confirms earlier estimates revealed by the Guardian of a major, unexplained rise in cancers and chronic neural-tube, cardiac and skeletal defects in newborns. The authors found that malformations are close to 11 times higher than normal rates, and rose to unprecedented levels in the first half of this year – a period that had not been surveyed in earlier reports.

The findings, which will be published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, come prior to a much-anticipated World Health Organisation study of Falluja's genetic health. They follow two alarming earlier studies, one of which found a distortion in the sex ratio of newborns since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 – a 15% drop in births of boys.

Dancewater said...

How WikiLeaks Enlightened US in 2010

- Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top commanders repeatedly, knowingly lied to the American public about rising sectarian violence in Iraq beginning in 2006, according to the cross-referencing of WikiLeaks' leaked Iraq war documents and former Washington Post Baghdad Bureau Chief Ellen Knickmeyer's recollections.

- According to one tabulation, there have been 100,000 causalities, mostly civilian, in Iraq - greater than the numbers previously made public, many of them killed by American troops but most of them were killed by other Iraqis, according to the WikiLeaks Iraq documents dump.

[and there are many more that the US forces did not know about]

- U.S. authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished, according to the WikiLeaks Iraq documents dump.

- U.S. special-operations forces have targeted militants without trial in secret assassination missions, and many more Afghan civilians have been killed by accident than previously reported, according to the WikiLeaks Afghanistan war document dump.

- Afghan President Hamid Karzai freed suspected drug dealers because of their political connections, according to a secret diplomatic cable. The cable, which supports the multiple allegations of corruption within the Karzai government, said that despite repeated rebukes from U.S. officials in Kabul, the president and his attorney general authorized the release of detainees. Previous cables accused Karzai's half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, of being a corrupt narcotics trafficker.

[these guys are not going to live too long if they keep cutting into the CIA drug profits]